Date of decision: 27 May 2025
Summary
The complaint concerned the Council’s failure properly to assess disability related expenses (DRE) when calculating a client’s home care charges, and its delay in responding to correspondence that had come to be treated as a complaint. This led to increased care costs and significant distress for Mrs M and her family.
What happened
Mr X challenged the Council’s assessment of the DRE of his mother, Mrs M, which affected her financial contribution to care at home.
Previous assessments were face-to-face, but the 2024 assessment was done by questionnaire, resulting in reduced DRE and higher charges.
The complainant also raised issues about specific expenses. Namely, no DRE had been allowed for building works, energy use and CCTV in August 2024.
The Council treated the correspondence as a service request at first, then failed to respond and it was somehow then treated as a complaint. It was still ignored until the Council was prompted by the Ombudsman in January 2025.
In terms of building work to replace the conservatory roof and removal of asbestos in the roof, the Council’s stance was that this was not mentioned during the financial assessment. It would not be disregarded as DRE as it is property maintenance and did not directly relate to Mrs M’s care needs, nor was it related to her disability.
It was established, however, that Mrs M had paid £2293 towards building work to install a wet room. The rest of the building work was covered by a DFG. [It is not possible to tell from the report whether the £2293 was private expenditure on top of the grant for something that was her preference, or which was part and parcel of the works but not covered by the grant for some reason, or the woman’s share of the statutory charge to the household through the DFG system.]
After consultation, the council agreed to apply this expenditure over 10 years hence making an allowance of £4.41 per week in regarding DRE.
The Council said work to install CCTV was not mentioned during the financial assessment. For it to be considered as DRE, it would need to be established that CCTV was a part of Mrs M’s care and support and not just for general security, and this was accepted as something that should have been considered.
Mrs M lived in a semi-detached bungalow [it is not clear whether she was the owner or lived with her son or anyone else] with a hybrid hospital bed and a ceiling mounted hoist using electricity. She was immobile and so the temperature of the property needed to be maintained at a certain level. Mrs M’s estimated annual cost of gas was £1,252, which was lower in fact than even accommodation for a single person in a small flat, which was the lowest category of costs for which the Council had figures. The Council’s stance was that if Mr X provided different evidence of average electricity bills, a weekly allowance could be calculated as DRE, but that it would be small.
The Council stated that the delay in responding to the complaint was due to an oversight. The investigator found fault on this point, because it was a fact that the complaint was not considered in accordance with its complaints procedure.
What was found
The Ombudsman found the Council had simply failed to respond to the complaint in line with its policy, causing unnecessary delay and distress.
The investigator did not come off the fence as to whether in fact the complaint at the first level to the council had been properly aired, given that the Council’s stance on so much was that this or that had not been mentioned.
The Council also failed properly to assess some DRE, notably for a wet room, undeniable use of electricity for the bed and hoist and potential expense for CCTV, breaching statutory guidance. The Council was ordered to backdate any changes to August 2024, and pay £300 compensation for distress and frustration caused by the complaint handling failure.
Points to note for councils, professionals, people using services and their carers, advocacy groups and members of the public
Community care law highlights a number of important principles that ought to be better reflected in the analysis of this decision. Firstly, financial assessments for care charges must be conducted in accordance with the Care Act 2014 and its statutory regulations, and the Guidance, which the report misquotes, carelessly.
The concern about the average heating bills figures used by councils is a national concern, because NAFAO uses figures that have been uprated from the early 2000s, disregarding the parallel improvement in building standards which has therefore reduced electricity costs, (discounting inflation in that particular sector), as a matter of proportion of household bills.
The fact that the bed and hoist undeniably generated electricity costs directly related to Mrs M’s disability, but would not generate a rational decision on DRE, is actually an example of a council getting away with applying a blanket approach, rather than thinking about other ways of working out what that cost was! Average heating bills is another example of that tendency but the investigator did not FIND fault arising from the concept of average heating bills at all.
We don’t think that anyone can derive from this report a position that financial assessment must be done face-to-face but we absolutely understand why a move from a visit to a questionnaire would be regarded as a sign of more superficial and in this case, inadequate probing – regardless of mistakes in thinking or approach once the council had extracted the facts. It’s an illustration of how a lighter system can lead to harder administration and more distress all round.
Community care law also recognises that expenditure such as on adaptations (like wet rooms), increased utilities costs, or security measures can be essential to a disabled person’s independence and well-being, and public law principles require councils to provide clear reasons for their decisions and consider all relevant evidence, including expert or detailed submissions on DRE. The sector would be assisted by more detail from the investigator here about the expenditure – if it was not the charge for the DFG, that was being counted, then it needed to be considered with regard to whether it was part and parcel of the building work for which Mrs M had paid a top up, or whether it was something unnecessary that she’d chosen to pay extra for. At least it was counted, in the end, however.
Additionally, councils must follow legally compliant complaint handling procedures under both local policy and broad public law principles relating to procedural fairness, timeliness, and transparency. The delay described in this decision reflects a breach of those standards, affecting not only the individual complainant, but also the wider confidence in the system. Community care law emphasises that remedies should return the person to the correct financial position, account for distress, and ensure compliance with statutory guidance going forward, including backdating corrections where there is an error attributed to council action or omission.
Finally, best practice from both statutory guidance and community care law would require councils to actively support service users and their families during assessment and review, inform them of rights to challenge decisions, and properly explain how DRE is computed in accordance with the Care Act. The lack of detail in the Ombudsman’s own report about how the statutory scheme works, what constitutes a thorough DRE assessment, or the wider context of legal duties suggests there are areas where a more specialist perspective would offer added depth and precision.
It is interesting to us that the report reveals that the matter was first put forward, it was ‘treated’ as if it was not a complaint, but was a ‘service request’ – which meant that Bristol may have been following the advice in the Ombudsman’s model complaint process recommendations from 2025 – ie that not ALL points made by the public need to be treated as a complaint.
This correspondence to the Council should, in our view, have been taken as a challenge to the appropriateness of the DRE information and advice aspect of financial assessment and the look and feel of the questionnaire – and thus to the legality and appropriateness of the outcome, given communication failings on both sides.
The recommended model complaint handling process does say that matters of financial assessment and DRE are to be excluded as OUTSIDE the recommendation that internal review should be enough before someone is encouraged to go to the Ombudsman, no doubt because so many councils initiate financial assessment without mentioning anything other than the fact of its standard DRE allowance, meaning that MOST people need to come back with more details. There must be a better way, we think, than all the to-ing and fro-ing that is thereby required. Using a questionnaire however, can tend to make it look as if there are black and white rules around DRE, whereas this is simply not the case. There is professional discretion, which finance officers are supposed to be able to exercise!
Please use the following link to read the original Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman’s Bristol City Council (24 012 672) report.
If you are affected by the issues in this report, please consider asking a free, one-off question, anonymously, at a level of principle, here. Our experts’ opinions provided in response will then serve both you and the broader community when posted.
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